GEAR UP Alabama

Website Design | Video Production | Social Media Strategy

Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) is a grant program of the US Department of Education that increases the number of low-income students who are prepared to enter and succeed in college. As GEAR UP neared the end of its grant cycle, the organization needed to better showcase their impact over the last 5 years.

THE AUDIENCE

GEAR UP works with high school students and their parents, teachers in the schools they support, and their GEAR UP staff members in the field. They wanted their website and social media platforms to be a place where each of those groups could easily access the resources they needed.

Website Design

Their previous website was outdated, dysfunctional, and didn’t accurately reflect the prestige of the program. It was also clunky on the back-end, and even the most millennial staff members struggled to figure out how to navigate it.

The new website would serve as a resource hub for the GUA community. Since that community consisted of 3 different groups, we overemphasized those categories so that users’ experiences could be guided by the group they belonged to.

Video Production

GEAR UP already had so many inspiring stories of success amongst the students and their families, but they hadn’t done a good job of documenting them.

In the promotional video we created, we used our people-focused approach and captured the testimonials of the students themselves, as well as the educators. It was all shot at one of their conferences, which gave us access to students from all around the state at one time. It also gave us an opportunity to capture some engaging b-roll content.

Social Media Strategy

GUA had basically been winging it on social media. We created a strategy that allowed them to target different audience sects by content type and platform. We set some goals and objectives, and then we gave them instructions on how to best get there, as well as some content templates.

GUA primarily engaged with their students in person, whether that was in school or at a conference. But when COVID caused all of that to come to a halt, the organization didn’t know how to pivot. We gave them focus and strategy that allowed them to connect with their students online in a meaningful way during one of the most stressful times of their lives.